[nos-bbs] TELpac nodes and JNOS

[Andre v Schayk]

Rick Williams schreef:

>I am sure that many of us are coming at this from different perspectives. My
>perspective is primarily for emergency communications. How to have a robust
>messaging system that primarily works without the internet, especially for
>nearby stations, and yet has the ability to go into the internet for
>delivery of messages when you must do it in order to have a reasonable
>delivery time and to non ham persons who have e-mail addresses.
>
>I have some questions (as I often do):
>
>1. If xNOS was able to do much of this, and do it some years ago, why did it
>not succeed in being developed for a large part of amateur radio?
>  
>
Hams are becomming more and more point and click opperators and are 
unwilling or unable to learn networking technics.

>2. Is it primarily because of the overly geek requirements to get it to
>work?
>  
>
That is one way of saying it, years ago it was normal to edit 
configuration files, now it scares users away.

>3. For proper use of an xNOS system, do you need to use the 44 IP address
>scheme? Or can you use DHCP in some way?
>  
>
There is no reason not to be able to use DHCP but it would mean that one 
and only one person on a frequentie needs to run a DHCP server, no 
problem on a lap but might be hard in adhoc networks.

>4. With slow, e.g.,  less than 9k6 speeds, TCP/IP is not practical and seems
>to have been one of the main downfalls as to why it never caught on.
>  
>
That could explain why it is still active in europe where the minimum 
speed on 70cm and up is 9k6 and top speeds are reaching 10 mbit/s

>5. What is the main problem with running this stuff on the MS Windows
>platform as a Windows program? And for that matter, when running on Linux,
>why could not a GUI interface be developed, perhaps similar to AirMail to
>handle much of the complicated stuff and keep it away from non technical
>people?
>  
>
xNOS was and I think still is being written with functionalety in mind, 
there are a few configuration utileties but there are so many ways to 
configure xNOS that a util can never offer it all, a GUI config util can 
offcourse offer a good starting place and might be enough for the 
everyday user.

the application users probably are better off with an easy way to 
configure the tcp/ip functions of flexnet or agwpe, aftreall they have 
no use for running fullfletched servers of their own and can always run 
light servers as windows programs.outgoing connections can also be 
handled with KLMproxy.

>73,
>
>Rick, KV9U
>  
>
73 de Andre PE1RDW